A recent, prolonged lull in the sun's activity did not prevent the Earth from absorbing more solar energy than it let escape back into space, a NASA analysis of the Earth's recent energy budget indicates.

An imbalance like this drives global warming — since more energy is coming in than leaving — and, because it occurred during a period when the sun was emitting comparatively low levels of energy, the imbalance has implications for the cause of global warming.

The results confirm greenhouse gases produced by human activities are the most important driver of global climate change, according to the researchers.More: http://www.space.com...ge-warming.html

Unfortunately this sort of discredited nonsense gets a lot of press; given that the author, James Hansen, is one of the prime fraudsters responsible for perpetrating the original “Great Global Warming Scam”, this can be seen as just more manufactured fraudulent nonsense produced in his efforts to keep the cash rolling in. It has no credibility amongst real scientists.

Real scientists world wide are salivating at the thought of Hansen actually following through with his threats to file a law suit against his critics; real scientists would love to get him on to the witness stand and subject him to a rigorous cross examination.

If the great scam were not such a big money maker for so many pretend scientists around the world, Hansen would be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff.

Of course this also raises the question: If “the science is settled”, why is so much research money still being poured into it?

I have to point out it's a low ball tactic to use an Ad Hominem. It's a reflection of your prejudices and it's a failed attempt to discredit the data by discrediting the man when the data speaks for itself. Address the data not the man. Pick holes in the data if you can.

I have to point out it's a low ball tactic to use an Ad Hominem. It's a reflection of your prejudices and it's a failed attempt to discredit the data by discrediting the man when the data speaks for itself. Address the data not the man. Pick holes in the data if you can.

Evidently you have not been paying attention over the past couple of years.

“The Great Global Warming Scam” was uncovered when the three perpetrators, James Hanson, Michael Mann and Phil Jones refused to release their original data or research methods to other scientists for examination and verification.

In fact, they have taken court action to suppress the details of their “research”, and make it unavailable to the scientific community.

When they refused to release the details of their work, as is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method, they were served with requests under the “Freedom of Information” laws in their respective countries.

They defied these requests, despite this clearly being illegal; not only that, but in order to ensure non compliance with these “Freedom of Information” requests, they deliberately deleted or “lost” significant amounts of their data.

These actions on their part escaped court action due to legal technicalities.

The numerous errors and misrepresentations in their published “research” were revealed when real scientists reconstructed data sets from original sources and demonstrated that the published work and conclusions by these three “scientists” was the result of fraudulently manipulated data.

That the scam was a deliberate fraud, and not just “human error”, was verified about two years ago when the first batch of “Climategate” emails were released; and the second set of emails, released a couple of months ago, serves to reinforce the evidence for fraud.

As you are aware, the State of Virginia is currently fighting in the courts to have the details of the work published by Michael Mann released and made public, as required by both the scientific method and by the fact that the research was publicly funded and is public property.

Despite these requirements, both “The University of Virginia” and Michael Mann have been fighting tooth and nail to keep details of his “research” suppressed and unavailable for review and verification by the scientific community.

There is an important distinction between the desire for these details by the scientific community, and that of the State of Virginia.

The scientists want the information in order to examine the data and methods of the “research”, as is fundamental to the scientific method and scientific ethics.

In contrast, the State of Virginia sees this information as “the smoking gun” showing criminal fraud on the part of Michael Mann, and by association, James Hansen and Phil Jones.

In light of the above, it is somewhat difficult to “pick holes in the data”, when that data is deliberately deleted, “lost” or supressed by court order.

As an aside to this, you should know that the whole issue of the global energy balance is a highly contentious and controversial issue amongst real scientists. It is a topic that is still in its infancy, and subject to a high degree of uncertainty, random variability, and complex chaotic processes.

It is the subject of a lot of vigorous debate amongst real scientists, who do exchange details of their data and methods; and there is certainly no agreement on the subject.

Furthermore, Milankovitch theory has great relevance to this topic. It has been established for almost one hundred years, and while it is generally ignored by Hansen and his cronies, it is given due consideration in this debate by all real scientists.

As a consequence of all of the above, when James Hansen publishes a paper on the subject, indeed any subject, real scientists automatically feed it through the shredder.

I have to point out it's a low ball tactic to use an Ad Hominem. It's a reflection of your prejudices and it's a failed attempt to discredit the data by discrediting the man when the data speaks for itself. Address the data not the man. Pick holes in the data if you can.

Evidently you have not been paying attention over the past couple of years.

“The Great Global Warming Scam” was uncovered when the three perpetrators, James Hanson, Michael Mann and Phil Jones refused to release their original data or research methods to other scientists for examination and verification.

In fact, they have taken court action to suppress the details of their “research”, and make it unavailable to the scientific community.

When they refused to release the details of their work, as is a fundamental requirement of the scientific method, they were served with requests under the “Freedom of Information” laws in their respective countries.

They defied these requests, despite this clearly being illegal; not only that, but in order to ensure non compliance with these “Freedom of Information” requests, they deliberately deleted or “lost” significant amounts of their data.

These actions on their part escaped court action due to legal technicalities.

The numerous errors and misrepresentations in their published “research” were revealed when real scientists reconstructed data sets from original sources and demonstrated that the published work and conclusions by these three “scientists” was the result of fraudulently manipulated data.

That the scam was a deliberate fraud, and not just “human error”, was verified about two years ago when the first batch of “Climategate” emails were released; and the second set of emails, released a couple of months ago, serves to reinforce the evidence for fraud.

As you are aware, the State of Virginia is currently fighting in the courts to have the details of the work published by Michael Mann released and made public, as required by both the scientific method and by the fact that the research was publicly funded and is public property.

Despite these requirements, both “The University of Virginia” and Michael Mann have been fighting tooth and nail to keep details of his “research” suppressed and unavailable for review and verification by the scientific community.

There is an important distinction between the desire for these details by the scientific community, and that of the State of Virginia.

The scientists want the information in order to examine the data and methods of the “research”, as is fundamental to the scientific method and scientific ethics.

In contrast, the State of Virginia sees this information as “the smoking gun” showing criminal fraud on the part of Michael Mann, and by association, James Hansen and Phil Jones.

In light of the above, it is somewhat difficult to “pick holes in the data”, when that data is deliberately deleted, “lost” or supressed by court order.

As an aside to this, you should know that the whole issue of the global energy balance is a highly contentious and controversial issue amongst real scientists. It is a topic that is still in its infancy, and subject to a high degree of uncertainty, random variability, and complex chaotic processes.

It is the subject of a lot of vigorous debate amongst real scientists, who do exchange details of their data and methods; and there is certainly no agreement on the subject.

Furthermore, Milankovitch theory has great relevance to this topic. It has been established for almost one hundred years, and while it is generally ignored by Hansen and his cronies, it is given due consideration in this debate by all real scientists.

As a consequence of all of the above, when James Hansen publishes a paper on the subject, indeed any subject, real scientists automatically feed it through the shredder.

Still using the Ad hominems.

Reasons why I think you are a denier. For some it is simple greed, but for all of the deniers to a varying degree there is the fairly simple point that if we are indeed facing increased warming, with even half the catastrophic consequences actual climate scientists are predicting, then we will indeed need to scale back or at least drastically change both production and consumption, and it will require a great deal of planning and regulation. It can't be overemphasized that to many deniers these kinds of consequences seem more terrifying than the heat waves and frigid winters, desertification, water and food shortages, rising sea levels etc that scientists predict. So the planet can't possibly be warming, because if it is, the future is too frightening to contemplate. Not because of ecological changes but because of political and economic changes an adequate response would require. In addition, I think they just can't face they might be wrong.

Fakegate: The Obnoxious Fabrication of Global WarmingAbout every four years, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces a voluminous Assessment Report (AR) on the state of global warming science, such as it is. Two years after each AR, the IPCC produces an updating Interim Report.

In 2008, The Heartland Institute, headquartered in Chicago, began organizing international conferences of scientists from across the globe who want to raise and discuss intellectually troubling questions and doubts regarding the theory that human activity is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. Six conferences have taken place to date, attracting more than 3,000 scientists, journalists, and interested citizens from all over the world.

(Full disclosure: As indicated by my nearby bio, I am a Heartland Senior Fellow, one of several affiliations I have with free-market think tanks and advocacy groups.)

In 2009, Heartland published Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). That 860-page careful, dispassionate, thoroughly scientific volume, produced in conjunction with the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, explored the full range of alternative views to the UN’s IPCC. Two years later, Heartland published the 418 page Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2011 Interim Report of the NIPCC, which updated the research regarding global warming and “climate change” since the 2009 volume.

Through these activities and more like them, Heartland has become the international headquarters of the scientific alternative to the UN’s IPCC, now providing full scale rebuttals to the UN’s own massive reports. Any speaker, any authority, any journalist or bureaucrat asserting the catastrophic danger of supposed man-caused global warming needs to be asked for their response to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, then they are not qualified to address the subject.

This is the essential background to understanding “Fakegate,” the strange and still being written story of the decline and fall of political activist Peter Gleick, who had successfully engineered a long career posing as an objective climate scientist. Gleick, who has announced he is taking a “temporary, short-term leave of absence” as president of the Pacific Institute, also served until recently as chairman of the science integrity task force of the American Geophysical Union.

Gleick has publicly confessed that he contacted The Heartland Institute fraudulently pretending to be a member of the Board of Directors. Emails released by The Heartland Institute show that he created an email address similar to that of a board member and used it to convince a staff member to send him confidential board materials. Gleick then forwarded the documents to 15 global warming alarmist advocacy organizations and sympathetic journalists, who immediately posted them online and blogged and wrote about them.

Their expectation apparently was that the documents would be as embarrassing and damaging to the global warming skeptics as were the emails revealed in the “Climategate” scandal to the alarmist side. The Climategate revelations showed scientific leaders of the UN’s IPCC and global warming alarmist movement plotting to falsify climate data and exclude those raising doubts about their theories from scientific publications, while coordinating their message with supposedly objective mainstream journalists.

But the stolen Heartland documents exonerated, rather than embarrassed, the skeptic movement. They demonstrate only an interest at Heartland in getting the truth out on the actual objective science. They revealed little funding from oil companies and other self interested commercial enterprises, who actually contribute heavily to global warming alarmists as protection money instead. The documents also show how poorly funded the global warming skeptics at Heartland are, managing on a shoestring to raise a shockingly successful global challenge to the heavily overfunded UN and politicized government science.

As the Wall Street Journal observed on Feb. 21, while Heartland’s budget for the NIPCC this year totals $388,000, that compares to $6.5 million for the UN’s IPCC, and $2.5 billion that President Obama’s budget commits for research into “the global changes that have resulted primarily from global over-dependence on fossil fuels.” That demonstrates how an ounce of truth can overcome a tidal wave of falsehood.

I suggest you not rely of information by a politician that's 5 years old. Notice the author's argument is an argument of economics first science second. I wonder if he considers the economic cost to future generations over short term economic gains.

Your disbelief in the face of facts that human caused climate change is impossible is so entrenched that nothing short of a truckload of Ex Lax would change your mind.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is proud to announce a provocative new book on environmental policy, Blue Planet in Green Shackles by Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic. President Klaus makes the case that policies being proposed to address global warming are not justified by current science and are, in fact, a dangerous threat to freedom and prosperity around the world. --- Klaus argues that the environmental movement has transformed itself into an ideology that seeks to restrict human activities at any cost, while pursuing an impossible utopian dream of a perfectly "natural" world. The supposed threat of human civilization against a fragile Earth has become an article of faith, especially in the realm of global warming activism. --- "The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism," writes Klaus. "It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism." --- The publication of Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? continues the Competitive Enterprise Institute's history of fighting alarmist climate policies. CEI has long argued that whatever challenges future climate changes might bring, the worst possible response is to restrict human freedom and slow economic growth and innovation. --- "Today, the global warming debate raging in both the United States and Europe has become extremely contentious. On both sides of the Atlantic, the debate has metastasized into cultural warfare against economic liberty," writes CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. in the book's foreword. "For that reason, pro-freedom voices are needed to reframe the debate to show how a free people can better address the challenges facing Western civilization. To that end, we are proud to publish Blue Planet in Green Shackles."

Your responses simply serve to confirm the point I have been making all along: “science” is little more than just another religion; it is rife with beliefs, dogmatism and ideology. When the facts don’t fit the theory, ditch the facts.

This is the point made in “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” with respect to the environmental movement in general, and “The Great Global Warming Scam” in particular.

There was a time when the environmental movement was concerned with the oceans, the lands and the creatures that live within them. Now, it has morphed into a political ideology in which the environment is little more than a smokescreen for a greater political agenda.

“The Great Global Warming Scam” is the money making arm of the environmental movement; it is a Ponzi scheme in which the world’s taxpayers are defrauded of billions of dollars which are paid into the pockets of the warmists. It is all about the fraudulent manipulation and distortion of science for financial benefit; follow the money.

So while we have wind farms that are slaughtering birds by the millions world wide; rain forests are being chopped down for palm oil plantations; food prices continue to rise as prime farmland is being converted to bio-fuel production; ecosystems are being destroyed for solar farms and people freeze to death because they can’t afford to heat their houses, the warmists continue to rake in the big bucks. The gravy train rolls on.

I suggest that you read the previous posts made on this topic, and actually read Klaus’ book.

The idea that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a couple of centuries since the Industrial Revolution will have no significant impact on the climate, and hence the human race, is a crazy idea.

So, your answer is to blithely skip down the road of burning fossil fuels and turn a blind eye to the results of such action and alternative sources ?

Interests:spirituality, art, design, reading, photography, my family (of course), nature, biology, genetics... I could go on, but I think I will stop here.

Posted 13 March 2012 - 09:09 PM

Just because some of the data has been fabricated and is not good DOESN'T mean that all of the data is no good. That's like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The Inuit up north have been keeping track of weather for generations. Many of their elders note that the sea ice used to form in Sept/Oct and not disappear until May/June. Now the sea ice doesn't form until Nov and is gone in March. In ONE generation, their hunting season has been cut in half. The polar bears face the same problem as they hunt off the sea ice and now have become an endangered species. Warmer water animals are now being found further north than before.

Just google the Inuit. Google polar bears. The observations are out there.

PS: I can agree that Climate change is now being used to forward political ideology. I don't like that either. We have to find some middle ground.

Interests:spirituality, art, design, reading, photography, my family (of course), nature, biology, genetics... I could go on, but I think I will stop here.

Posted 17 March 2012 - 03:12 PM

Why don't we just use something called common sense. Over a century worth of burning fossil fuels and the by-product of that burning (carbon dioxide, etc.) has to have some effect on climate. These gases don't escape the Earth's atmosphere, they stay and increase. Just look at my previous post, those are just some of the visible outcomes that are being felt.

No matter what anyone thinks of the data or its sources, the change is happening and its being at least half way driven by the human activity of burning fossil fuels and adding carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane to the Earth's atmosphere.

I'm not out to prove anything really. I just want to encourage everyone to use their heads and really think about what we are seeing right now. Glaciers everywhere on the retreat, wild weather and the stuff I already posted. Can you imagine what the social, religious and political problems will be when the glaciers that are the source of the Ganges River in India disappear and the Ganges becomes a seasonal river?